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Monday, May 17, 2010

Wind & Pedal Power!

Just a block away from our school is a new wind turbine. From my understanding, it is Connecticut's first commercial wind turbine and every time we ride up to school or I step out of the school building and catch a glimpse of it, I get supremely jazzed. Structurally it is just cool looking, and I love thinking about the power it is generating as the blades spin. It has been a really great topic of discussion with my kids and all the students in the school. The company that owns it and has been really responsive to our queries and each of my boys has gotten to visit the turbine with their classes and learn more about how it works.

The company recently announced a competetion to name the wind turbine and both S & C jumped at the chance to participate. Each boy came up his own name and then had to explain why they suggested this name and what he likes about the wind turbine.

What does this have to do with bikes you ask? Well, just ask C:

I hope you are able to click on the photo and see C's drawing up close.

Stupid question I've been trying to find out ( well just by asking people- no real research) is on whether the vibrations of the turbine make a noise or low hum? I was having an FB argument about them and one person sited some medical complications ( eh I can't remember) pertaining to the turbines and made a comment about sound and I wanted to find out about it.

a neighbor and I talked casually about campainging to get one for our two block radius although each house would have to go in several thousand dollars so I'm not hopeful but I have sound issues esp from low constant hums and was curious... Otherwise I love them. C's pic is truly great.

Beautiful pic - I've tweeted it on behalf of Cyclorama. I'm just back from a holiday in Scotland, we visited a remote community that's a couple of hours walk from the nearest road: all the crofts have wind turbines. Looks amazing!

Don't really know, but I suspect soundwise that it depends quite a lot on size and specifications: the ones we saw in Scoraig were pretty small.

Just did a little googling on the noise issue and found this http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2010/02/wind-turbine-noise-impacts.html if that helps :)

that link was helpful. Well sadly knowing myself and my low tolerance to things like electrical currant hums and sounds I could be the low percent who would tear her hair out and have to move. I still think they are great. perhaps I could use the wind power to run my white noise machine on ocean waves which I can tolerate. :-)